The research is concerned with understanding the information- processing characteristics of language acquisition. The principal goal is to develop a computer simulation program that can successfully learn a natural language in circumstances approximating those of a child learning a natural language. It is assumed that a child is presented with sentences and can determine their meaning from context. The simplest example of this is when a child is presented with a picture and a sentence describing it. Thus, the research is concerned with identifying the contribution of a semantic referent to language acquisition. An initial program has been constructed, and the proposed research is concerned with increasing its power to learn language and with making it a better simulation of how humans learn languages. Experiments with humans learning artificial language are proposed to test the program's predictions about language learnability.